"Unwritten law" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... philosophy of science | remember the three features in the Latin of | Novum Organum: Schematismus, | Processus, Form. These operations, which | have counterparts in the "case method" of | searching for the implicit unwritten law | behind a series of judge rulings, cannot be | understood from a reading of the Ellis | translation. Nobody who works from that | version can understand, nor do justice to, | Bacon's science. with the Annotations of | Hermes Stella{2} | ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... the right of closing his lodge at any hour that he may deem expedient, notwithstanding the whole business of the evening may not have been transacted. This regulation arises from the unwritten law of Masonry. As the Master is responsible to the Grand Lodge for the fidelity of the work done in his lodge, and as the whole of the labor is, therefore, performed under his superintendence, it follows that, to enable ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... with a certain amount of respect. Were they framing up something themselves? At any rate I felt that I would rather see them here and know what they were than to be jostled by them in a street car. The sleek proprietor kept a careful eye on them and I knew that a sort of unwritten law would prevent them from trying on anything that would endanger their welcome in a joint none ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... an officer in the king's army, and there is an unwritten law that all non-commissioned officers are my inferiors, here or elsewhere, and must obey me. You shall go to the guardhouse. I asked nothing of you but a common courtesy, and you became insolent. To the guardhouse you ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... well that there went no labourer without his hire, were it of money-coins, were it of hemp gallows-ropes: that function was yours, and from immemorial time has been; yours, and as yet no other's. These poor shirt-spinners have forgotten much, which by the virtual unwritten law of their position they should have remembered: but by any written recognised law of their position, what have they forgotten? They were set to make shirts. The Community with all its voices commanded them, saying, "Make shirts;"—and ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... has its own laws,—the common and unwritten law of the forecastle, of which Admiralty Courts take infrequent cognizance, and the law of the quarter-deck, which is to be read in acts of Parliament and statutes of Congress. The sea has its own customs, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... long previously formed on the score that "he has been commanded to dine with H.R.H." The horrible capillary plaster necessary before a man can serve decently as an opener of carriage-doors! The horsehair envelopes without which our legal brains cannot work! The unwritten law by which a man has to nurse his hat and stick throughout a call unless his hostess specially asks him ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... ancient, unwritten law the whole country is roughly divided among the hunters. Each has his own recognised hunting ground, usually a given river valley, that is his exclusive and hereditary property; another hunter may follow a wounded ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... she may suffer, she must present as calm and serene a countenance as a warrior in the hour of danger, and fall, if necessary, upon the spot, with death in her heart and a smile upon her lips. In order to obey this unwritten law, Madame de Bergenheim, after a slight interruption, seated herself at the piano to accompany three or four young girls who were each to sing in turn the songs that they had been ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... of the Academy, it has, of course, met with frequent assaults at the hands of men for whom prescribed academic law was as naught in comparison with the higher law of genius. In 1819 such a man appeared, with a picture which violated the unwritten law formulated by David: "Look in your ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... began to hate the controlling absurdities of civilization. All her wildness seemed to rise up and rush to the surface. How inhuman, how against nature it was, that two human beings who wished to know each other should be held back from such knowledge by mere convention, by the unwritten law of the solemn and formal introduction! A great happiness might lie in their intercourse, but conventionality solemnly and selfishly forbade it, unless they could find a common acquaintance to mumble a few unmeaning words over them. Mumbo-Jumbo! What a fantastic ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... mechanicalized universe, with a resulting materialism of thought and life; at the best, it makes him a pragmatist with amiable but immediate objectives, just practical "results" as his guide and goal. Morality as, in Antigone's noble phrase, "the unwritten law of heaven" sinks down and disappears. There is no room here for the Job who abhors himself and repents in dust and ashes nor for Plato's One behind the Many; no perceptible room, in such a world, for any of the absolute values, the transcendent interests, the ethics of idealism, any eschatology, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... custom, and usage, and all that sort of thing, when you come to look at it; yes, and about the drift and progress of human opinion and movement, too. There are written laws—they perish; but there are also unwritten laws—they are eternal. Take the unwritten law of wages: it says they've got to advance, little by little, straight through the centuries. And notice how it works. We know what wages are now, here and there and yonder; we strike an average, and say that's the wages of to-day. We know ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Nation Developed.—The nation in embryo can be found in the primitive horde which was made up of families related by ties of kin, or by common language and customs. The control was held by the elderly men of experience, and exercised according to unwritten law. The horde was only loosely organized; it did not own land, but ranged over the hunting-grounds within its reach, and often small units separated permanently from the larger group. When hunting gave place to the ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... a show to escape. Thousands of gentlemen sportsmen have their own separate unwritten codes of honor, but so far as I know, few of them have been written out and adopted as binding rules of action. I know that among expert wing shots it is an unwritten law that quail and grouse must not be shot on the ground, nor ducks on the water. But, among the three million gunners who annually shoot in the United States how many, think you, are there who in actual practice observe ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... fact guided our Indian legislation. No Government was 'ever less justly chargeable with enacting laws merely for the sake of legislation.' The faults have arisen from defects of style and from the peculiar conditions of Indian administration. The unwritten law of India is mainly personal; and many difficulties have arisen from the mixture of English law with the Mohammedan and Hindoo laws and other native customs. All cases not otherwise provided for were to be decided by justice, equity, and good conscience. Much latitude ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... written down. Of course, the Vedas have been reduced into writing, but for all that, they continue to be called the Srutis, as the Common Law of England, though reduced into writing, is still called the unwritten law etc. etc. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... have less liberty than the slaves. How carefully guarded their position was by unwritten law Mary had reason to know. A girl-wife employed a slave-man to do work for a day. His master unexpectedly sent for him, and he asked the girl for the food which was part of his wage. She at first declined; her husband was absent, and it was ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... money to take care of, and sewed up the rest into the waistband of his trousers. (It is as safe as a bank to hand your money to an Arab chief who has entertained you in his tent. If you have "eaten his salt" he will not betray or rob you. Absolute loyalty to your guest is the unwritten law that no true Arab ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... be exercises of the prerogative which could not be affirmed to be illegal, but which no one would deny to be altogether inconsistent with the principles and practice of the constitution, since a great part of the constitution rested on unwritten law, on long-continued usage, Lex et consuetudo Parliamenti. And they affirmed that this measure was so opposed to that usage, that "no instance had occurred within a period of four hundred years in which a commoner had been raised to a seat in the House of Lords by a patent ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... two days after, announced that the wounded deputy sheriffs were out of danger. This hindered rather than helped the plans of the whites. There was no law on the statute books which would execute an Afro-American for wounding a white man, but the "unwritten law" did. Three of these men, the president, the manager and clerk of the grocery—"the leaders of the conspiracy"—were secretly taken from jail and lynched in a shockingly brutal manner. "The Negroes are getting too independent," they say, "we must teach ...
— Southern Horrors - Lynch Law in All Its Phases • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... rebuke, my companion and I were thankful to be invited into the parlor. Our long wait there caused uncomfortable misgivings. India's unwritten law for the truth seeker is patience; a master may purposely make a test of one's eagerness to meet him. This psychological ruse is freely employed in the West by doctors ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... chosen President. He might, had he wished, have been elected a third time. But like Washington he refused he refused to stand. And as those two great presidents refused to be elected a third time it has become a kind of unwritten law in the United States that no man shall be president longer than ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... unwritten law that each kind of cake must be really a separate recipe. To take a portion of ordinary cup-cake batter, and stir in some chopped nuts, and another portion and mix in some raisins, by no means met the requirements of ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... the lace curtains of the other house people were watching. This was in no way a breach of good manners, for in Berwick the unwritten law of neighbours' rights freely permitted the inspection of the arriving household gods of a new family. But etiquette demanded that the observers discreetly veil themselves behind the sheltering films of their ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... others of the illustrious personages who flourished in his time, Girolamo Cardano, or, as he has become to us by the unwritten law of nomenclature, Jerome Cardan, was fated to suffer the burden and obloquy of bastardy.[1] He was born at Pavia from the illicit union of Fazio Cardano, a Milanese jurisconsult and mathematician of considerable ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Terry adding an occasional word whenever the flow of affectionate badgering lagged. Fanny, who had served them since they were children, bustled in and out, redfaced, wholesome, fruitlessly trying to press upon Terry an excess of the over-ample dinner. It was a sort of unwritten law in Crampville that the Sunday dinner should be sufficiently heavy to drive the menfolk to a long ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... answered. "Don't you remember the fun of stoning those gray hornets' nests which used to be built under the school-house eaves in summer? We waited till the first recess to plug a stone through 'em, and nobody could get back in the door without being stung. It was against the unwritten law to stone the school-house ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... reading at his son's entrance. He muttered a welcome through the clouds, but he did not raise his eyes. Jimmy took the other arm-chair, and began to smoke silently. It was the unwritten law of the den that soothing silence rather than aimless chatter should prevail. It was not until a quarter of an hour had passed that Mr. Crocker dropped his ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the night was over, had to be washed down with Munich beer, which, at that time as still, I fancy, was best at Bauer's. By some unwritten law, inscrutable as the written, it was decreed that, though I might sit all evening the only woman at our table in the Orientale—oftener than not the only woman in the cafe—it was not "the thing" for me to go on to Bauer's. Therefore, first, the whole company would see me home. It was a short ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... connection with the evolutions of the Christian Church. In its divergence from Judaism and its beneficent laws, both social and moral, the Christian Church was but illy fit to cope with its persecutors of Pagan tendencies, or to enforce an unwritten law or code of morality or hygiene among an idolatrous, barbarous, and ignorant population such as it had to encounter. To its professors, the formation of that monachism which has been so much misunderstood ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... of the relation of God to man; in a word, they have overlooked the heart in man,—the heart which is the organ of love, as intelligence is the organ of thought. The imaginings of man in respect of God may be puerile and mistaken, but his instincts, which are his unwritten law, must be sometimes right; if not, Nature would have lied in creating him. You do not think Nature a lie," I said smiling,—"you, who said just now that truth was perhaps the only virtue? Now, whatever may have been the intention of God in giving those two instincts, mystery and prayer, whether he ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... come before a wife, of course—that's an unwritten law. [She sits by table, takes up tobacco and rolls ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... Misses Forbes, daughters of the geologist, are modest affairs with forty-foot fronts. Others, like Dean Norris's, cover two acres. Those built before 1800 have their birth-years painted carefully over their doorways, and it is an unwritten law that younger houses may not claim this privilege. Many are sheltered by box hedges, and none but has its garden—in which flowers other than hollyhocks, mignonette, larkspur, stock, and bachelor's buttons are ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... should be any who cared to instruct the Negroes. In the English Provinces, on the other hand, since teaching the slaves would probably result in their becoming Christians, the colonists naturally were strenuous in their efforts to prevent any enlightenment of the blacks, due to the existence of an unwritten law to the effect that no Christian might be held a slave. Many planters forbade the teaching of their slaves, until finally the Bishop of London settled the difficulty by issuing a formal declaration in which he stated that conversion did not ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... after breakfast and claimed the coat as belonging to Mrs. Ladley. But she refused to give it up. There is a sort of unwritten law concerning the salvage of flood articles, and I had to leave the coat, as I had my kitchen chair. But it was ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... his white brother. He is not wanted in city positions, because positions of that kind are always saved for the white wardheeling politicians. He is not wanted in State and Federal offices, because there is an unwritten law that a Negro shall not hold an office. He is not wanted on the Bench as a judge, because he would have to pass upon the white man's case also. Nor is he wanted on public conveyances, because here his presence ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... that can never come back, and men and women who were outwardly crude and illiterate but at core kind and chivalrous, and nearly always humorously unconventional. The bunch grass, so beloved by the patriarchal pioneers, has been ploughed up and destroyed; the unwritten law of Judge Lynch will soon become an oral tradition; but the Land of Yesterday blooms afresh as the Golden ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... numerous than the members—indeed more so—we finally accepted the happy suggestion of our mathematicians to call it the x Club; and the proposal of some genius among us, that we should have no rules, save the unwritten law not to have ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... early to bed and early to rise was an unwritten law. By six o'clock next morning, breakfast had been served, and the tourists were on deck with glasses, each anxious to discover objects of interest. During the night busy Leghorn on the coast, and Pisa, and Florence up the Arno, were left behind. Leo was proud of sunny and artistic Italy and ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... interpret such parts of his "book" as were unintelligible, to reconcile conflicting statements, and to fit the older legislation to changed circumstances. As the religious head of the community, his dictum became law; and these logia of the Prophet were handed around and handed down as the unwritten law by which his lieutenants were to be guided, in matters not only religious, but also legal. For "law" to them was part and parcel of "religion." This "hadith" grew apace, until, in the third century of the Hijrah, it was put to writing. Nothing bears weight which has ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... was necessary. When they drew up the rules of membership the other sex never fell like a black shadow on the paper; it was forgotten. We owe our eligibility to many other offices (generally disputed at law) to the same accident. In short, the unwritten law of the argumentum ad crinolinam puts us to ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... but his father smothered a sigh and watched him with curious solicitude. The unwritten law that Christopher had learnt so well had been very heavily infringed, and Charles Aston had no liking for the man who had infringed it, though ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... speech," the younger duchess said, laughing, "and shows indeed the truth of what you have said as to your ignorance of women. Do you not know, sir; that it is an unwritten law at court that every gentleman here must be at the feet of ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... royal commission had been issued for the purpose of inquiring how far it might be expedient to reduce the written and unwritten law of the country into one digest, and to report on the best manner of doing it. A report was made on this subject in 1834; and while the commissioners were occupied in carrying, in some degree, their own recommendations ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... societies. To obtain the indorsement of the political parties was much more difficult, and we were facing conditions in which partial success was worse than complete failure. It had long been an unwritten law before it became a written law in our National Association that we must not take partisan action or line up with any one political party. It was highly important, therefore, that either all parties should support ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... ran the two miles without a break, except twice, where there were gates to close. Dick, speeding a furlong before, had obligingly left them open; and a stockman is hard pressed indeed—or very drunk—when he fails to close his gates behind him. It is an unwritten law which becomes ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... has lately been made by Suffrage workers in New York because a bill was proposed prohibiting married women from teaching in the public schools. This has been the unwritten law in many places for years. The practice was adopted to offset the maintenance of married women. Teachers should receive more pay, but so should poets and artists, and we all hope the time will come when brain work will ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... old Republics we had a law which since the Union has become the unwritten law of South Africa. In this law it is laid down that a coloured policeman shall not lay his black hands on a white man even if he found him red-handed in the commitment of a crime. The duty of a coloured policeman in such circumstances would be to look around for ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship, after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her poor, pretty little face, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... not be overstepped on such a plea, even for the general good. Jefferson was so sensitive to this constitutional objection that he proposed to meet it by an amendment to the Constitution; but it was soon evident that the unwritten law of manifest destiny did not need the appeal to the ballot-box. "The grumblers," Jefferson wrote to a friend soon after the news of the treaty was received, "gave all the credit of the acquisition to the accident of war." "They would see," he added, ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... the question, What is Law? and to emphasise the essential difference between customary, conventional or written Law and that unwritten Law, proceeding from the Inward Light of Reason, that inspires men, in action as in words, to do as they would be done unto. He first gives the following clear, rational ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... attachment between these dogs and their African masters is deep and fully reciprocated. They are considered very dainty eating by the natives, and are indeed such a luxury that by an unwritten law only the superior sex—the men—are allowed to partake ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... sat still, and then he grew very calm. It was the calmness of the old Conway spirit returning. "Richard Travis," he said to himself, "knows as well what this act of his means in the South,—in the unwritten law of our land—as I do. He has taken his chance of life or death. I'll see that it is death. This is the last of me and my house. But in the fall I'll see that this Philistine of Philistines dies under ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... was a very recent acquisition, emerged stealthily from the council chamber after the manner of the conspirator in an Adelphi drama, and intimated that they thought that they would be able to get on without me. In obedience to an unwritten law, the last-joined member was always expected to do odd jobs of this kind, just as at some schools the bottom boy of the form is called upon by the form-master to perform certain ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... punished you. There were two reasons why I did not: the first was because I did not wish to punish her, and any blow at you would have reached her heavily. The second reason, subordinate to the first, is obvious: decent men, in these days, have tacitly agreed to suspend a violent appeal to the unwritten law as a concession to civilisation. This second reason, however, depends entirely upon the ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... saying and is an unwritten law that policemen should be Irish. I enjoy Greeks in classic literature or in restaurants, but not as policemen. There is a saying in the city that when Greek meets Greek they go together to get a job on the Market Street Railways. But when they get upon the police force, I for one, shall move to ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... is frequently involved in some action proposed for the moment. When such a moment comes he must be loyal to his flag and to a principle that if not generally acknowledged is an abiding rule with him; but his allies refuse to be bound by a principle that is an unwritten law for him because the law is not written down for them. This is the root of the trouble. The friends, thinking to work together for some common purpose, find the unsettled issue intrudes, and a debate ensues that leads to ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... Scales's experience, there was no lack of volunteers to take up the thread, though an unwritten law forbade interruptions. Our employer was among the group, and out of deference to our guest, the boys remained silent. Uncle Lance finally regaled us with an account of a fight between range stallions which he had once witnessed, ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... hundred sixty, and had proved his prowess with the shillalah. It was the unwritten law at Donnybrook that no soldiers should be allowed to attend the Fair. The managers, however, still continued to sell tickets to soldiers, yet to keep the enterprise from being wiped out of existence, only sixteen ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Goodness knows we all have home trials enough! (Lord ARTHUR and I frequently do not speak for a week unless someone is present)—but I do not think these things should be made public, and besides, it is an unwritten law amongst "smart" people to avoid subjects that "chafe"—which sounds like an anachronism—whatever that means! Having an opportunity of a "last word" on the Derby, I should like to say that, although my confidence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... by their practice with one another. Now some of his scholars showed such excellent aptitudes for deception and overreaching, and perhaps no lack of taste for common money-making, that they did not even spare their friends, but used their arts on them. [33] And so an unwritten law was framed by which we still abide, bidding us teach our children as we teach our servants, simply and solely not to lie, and not to cheat, and not to covert, and if they did otherwise to punish them, hoping to make them humane and law-abiding citizens. [34] But when they came to manhood, as ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... vast difficulty that whilst in most cases the novelist's procedure is to work on a system of exciting curiosity, it is an unwritten law of drama, almost universally true, that there must be no surprises for the audience, except, it may be, in farcical plays that do not pretend to represent life truly and in matters of detail. No doubt, unconscientious readers often commit an act of treason to the author, and cheat ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... regular perquisite of the rag-girls in the Cumquot Mill; indeed, any trifle, coin, or seal, or medal, was considered the property of the finder, this being an unwritten law of the rag-room. ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... declined, saying that election for life might result from repeated reelection. In following Washington's course and defending it on principle, he set an example to all his successors, making the "third term doctrine" a part of American unwritten law. ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... characteristic both of the English and American bar, and still prevails, though with diminishing force, has given, and necessarily given, great force to judicial precedents. It is mainly through them that with us unwritten law passes into written law. Precedent is a fruit of reason ripened by time. Time, it has been said, is the daughter of Antiquity and takes place after Reason, which is the daughter of Eternity. Precedent rests on both. A legal code framed ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... fisherman and his family in decency during the months of his inactivity. The shares which are apportioned to the working hands in each crew, and to the owners of the crafts and nets, are all determined by ancient custom. The unwritten law is clearly recognised and understood by all concerned, and thus the constant disputes which would otherwise inevitably arise are avoided. Custom—Aadat—is the fetish of the Malay. Before it even the ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... Kentucky, I know he cannot tell me what common law is meant by that first section. We know, as jurists, what is meant by the term common law, for it is a technical term. The common law is the law of England, the unwritten law of England, the lex non scripta. That is the common law in its legal acceptation. Is it, then, the law of England that is made a part of the Constitution, and to which the master is remitted for the security of his rights between him and his servant? Will any gentleman tell me that it is the common ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... some of the palliating expressions with which our legal atmosphere is permeated: "indiscreet and untactful," "the unwritten law," "swift justice," "murder a fine art," and remember that these are the terms that play around that triangle of corrupt judge, dallying lawyer, and bribed and illiterate jury—all conspiring to "shove by justice" with technicalities. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... works within the framework of the law—not only the written, but the unwritten law—of his society. In a slave society, any slave who openly rebels will find that he gets squashed pretty quickly. But many a slave-owner has danced willingly to the tune of a slave who was wiser and cleverer than he, without ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... ranged over the car, flickering like the tongue of a snake, seeming to cover every passenger at once. Beneath its deadly insistence, hands were upraised one after the other. Resistance at that moment meant instant death. The unwritten law of the West had to be obeyed. He "had ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... But, so far as men become good and wise, and rise above the state of children, so far they become emancipated from this written law, and invested with the perfect freedom which consists in the fulness and joyfulness of compliance with a higher and unwritten law; a law so universal, so subtle, so glorious, that nothing but the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... heart; to cause them shame by ill-conduct, to disgrace their name by bad actions, is the supreme crime. They represent the moral experience of the race: whosoever denies that experience denies them also, and falls to the level of the beast, or below it. They represent the unwritten law, the traditions of the commune, the duties of all to all: whosoever offends against these, sins against the dead. And, finally, they represent the mystery of the invisible: to Shinto belief, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... unwritten law for the bad man, but I notice it doesn't seem to satisfy y'u, my friend. Y'u and I know that my cousin, Ned Bannister, doesn't acknowledge any law, written or unwritten. He's a devil and he has no fear. Didn't he ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... Buckeye was accompanied with no dangerous travail; its infancy was free from the diseases of adolescent communities. The settlers, without any express prohibition, had tacitly dispensed with gambling and drinking saloons; following the unwritten law of example, had laid aside their revolvers, and mingled together peacefully when their labors were ended, without a single peremptory regulation against drinking and playing, or carrying lethal weapons. Nor had there been any ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... remained. The inhabitants grew to be proud of their rosy citadel; it was an unwritten law among them that every new house should adapt itself to this tone. For the rest, there was not much building done after his death, with the exception of a few isolated villas that sprang up, despite his old commands, in the neighbourhood. And the decline in population ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the water out," she said, rising wearily. "Will we be obliged to hire a watchman to camp by our water tank? This is serious, boys. The unwritten law of the desert would condemn whoever did this to a lariat and a yucca palm. Still, we don't know who did it. It's too dark to find tracks or to learn anything about it. It's seventeen miles to the Washburn-Stokes outfit—the nearest water ahead. ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... who had lost a sergeant through a German sniper; and the fact was duly reported. Now when a German sniper takes the life of a man in a battalion which goes in for the art itself, it is an unwritten law that from that moment a blood feud exists between the German and English snipers opposite. Though it takes a fortnight to carry out, yet ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... This unwritten law which prevails throughout the history of Catholic nations and expresses so forcibly and so persistently the doctrinal principle of which we spoke, justifies the claims of the Catholic Extension and gives strength ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... they were pushed, not pulled, by the powerful steamer which gathered them in tens and twenties before her, and rode the mid-current with them, when they were full, or kept the slower water near shore when they were empty. They claimed the river where they passed, and the 'Avonek' bowed to an unwritten law in giving them the full right of way, from the time when their low bulk first rose in sight, with the chimneys of their steamer towering above them and her gay contours gradually making themselves seen, till she ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... table, I under it, and next morning we hired horses and started for the 'Forks of the Yuba.' A few hours' ride brought us to the gold-hunters. Two or three hundred men were at work upon what had formerly been the bed of the river. By unwritten law, each miner was entitled to a certain portion of the 'bar,' as it was called, in which the gold is found. And, as the precious metal has to be obtained by washing, the allotments were measured by thirty feet on the banks of ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke |
